Disney Concert Hall road to music marks its 10th year

Recognizable as it is, walk around the gleaming stainless-steel structure of Walt Disney Concert Hall in the Bunker Hill area of Downtown Los Angeles and you feel like you are seeing many different buildings, and in some ways you are.

The Frank Gehry-designed cultural icon — the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — is turning 10, and in those years it has come to reflect the vibrancy and elusive nature of the diverse city that surrounds it.

Its official birthday celebration will be Oct. 23 with the world premiere of the orchestral version of legendary ‘60s rocker Frank Zappa’s “200 Motels.” How much more L.A. can you get than that?

But today, at 4 p.m., there is a community concert at Disney Hall, featuring the L.A. Phil and YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles) conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, music director for the L.A. Phil. While the concert is sold out, the performance is being broadcast live across the street at Grand Park.

Monday is the official opening of the Phil’s season, a red-carpet gala event celebrating the decade at Disney Hall, which features Yo-Yo Ma and an installation by video artist/director Netia Jones.

The event and the building itself may seemed to have been straight out of science fiction when the now 84-year-old Gehry first arrived in Los Angeles in 1947. It was mostly a sleepy burb then, a movie and aerospace town. Its most recognizable symbol was City Hall, built in 1928 and pretty typical of other phallic-style civic buildings put up around the country then. Two other notable downtown structures — The Department of Water and Power Building and The Music Center — would not be completed until the mid-1960s. At the time, the Hollywood sign was already in disrepair.

While all those structures have been used to symbolize the city, “The only building in the city that alone can represent Los Angeles” is Disney Hall, says Sylvia Lavin, director of critical studies at UCLArchitecture.

“When you see Disney Concert Hall, you think of Los Angeles the way you see the Eiffel Tower and think of Paris,” she says.

In all deference to the other famed structures Gehry has designed, Disney Hall is perhaps his most celebrated work. This is L.A., after all. The image of the sail-like structure is everywhere. As the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive Deborah Borda observes, you can get off a plane anywhere in the world see a picture of Walt Disney Hall there, either “advertising a car or something.”

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Indeed, the building has been in countless commercials, movies and TV shows. Cameras are the norm around it, whether weilded by professionals or tourists.

“I knew it was special soon after it opened when I would see wedding parties come down and take their pictures in front of it,” says Borda. “That’s when we first knew that the Hall was working its way to the heart of the city.”

Its success, though, is not measured only by its looks. Gehry’s designs and Yasuhisa Toyota’s acoustical innovations combined to create one of the great concert halls of the 21st century. Yet the 2,265-seat auditorium has an intimate feel, with its wooden interior and seating close to the orchestra. Even if you were to shut your eyes to the beauty of your surroundings, the clarity and richness of the sound is breathtaking.

“You enjoy going to that building, but you enjoy being in it even more. That’s critical,” says Christopher Alexander, architecture and design curator at the Getty Research Institute.

Gehry, a classical music fan, says he kept that in mind when designing the hall. When the “orchestra can feel the audience, they play better, and when the audience perceives them playing better, they respond with feeling. That’s a win-win on both sides,” he says.

Principal Concertmaster Martin Chalifour, who had a violin solo during the Hall’s first concert, knows that phenomenon. He played at the Phil’s previous home, The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, for eight years.

“It was tremendously different on the Chandler stage,” says Chalifour. “As a string player, you had to play with a lot of muscle there for the sound to reach the audience.”

That isn’t necessary in Disney Hall. Better acoustics have allowed the Philharmonic to discover a wider “palette of sound” and made them a better orchestra, he says.

“We can hear each other so much better and track each other’s lines,” Chalifour said.

There is also no doubt that the L.A. Phil is not only a better orchestra — first under Esa-Pekka Solonen, who was the conductor when Disney Hall opened, and now Dudamel — but it is now one of the best in the world.

The concert hall itself has also become an attraction for many great artists, keeping the place busy even when the Phil isn’t playing. The auditorium has something going on almost every night from September to June, whether it be classical, jazz or pop music.

This has helped lead to financial stability for the musical institution, which went through some rough times in the 1990s. Gehry had bid on the project back in 1988, but by the mid ‘90s the plan nearly collapsed for a variety of reasons, from temperaments and financing. The parking lot beneath the Hall was financed by the county with a bond, but the Hall was to be built from private donations.

It was only when Walt Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller made a $14 million gift on the condition that Gehry have full control of the design that is was able to move on. (“Very courageous,” the architect says.)

In the decade it’s been up and running, Disney Hall has become part of the fabric of the Los Angeles. Lavin believes that people should remember the struggle it took to build it.

“Before it was finished there was push back, resistance on almost every front. Now, I don’t think a single in person in L.A. would change a single molecule of it,” Lavin said. “I think that it’s a real piece of evidence of the importance of good architecture to the city.”

When Borda was brought into the Phil in 2000, there still was very little vision of how the hall would be used. One of her first decisions was to delay the opening by 10 months.

“It is absolutely critical that when the Hall opened, it was to be completely prepared,” she says.

The three days of opening galas proved to be an immense and unprecedented success in the classical music world.

But the Phil’s president is quick to note that before the glamour parties, there was a week of free concerts for kids, teachers, volunteers, seniors and those who worked on the hall — some 18,000 people in all.

“Our commitment is to be an important intersection between the artistic imperative and the social imperative,” says Borda.

That has been evident in the last decade by the Phil’s sponsorship of educational outreach programs and YOLA. Along the way, the organization has also become better off financially.

“We’ve had a strong but balanced budget since 2003,” says Borda. “You can’t have a healthy artistic institution if you don’t have a healthy financial plan to back it up.”

Disney Hall is also a key component in the “very complicated” ongoing revitalization of downtown, says Alexander.

“Disney Concert Hall really embodies the civic aspirations of L.A. while at the same time employing the architectural and technological innovations of the day,” Alexander says.

Lavin believes that local affection for the building has grown over the years.

“That is because it is sort of a new concert hall every time you go there,” she says.

The way the Hall is situated off the street, its design and materials “activate people’s imaginations.”

“It’s not a predictable form,” says Gehry about the building, which doesn’t seem to have a right angle in it.

But more than making something just different looking, he says what was important to him was to create places “where people — even if they did not understand the architecture immediately — at least felt comfortable and felt good, and felt like its a place they would like come back to.”

He achieved that in Disney Hall. But if there is one person who might make changes in the building, its Gehry himself. During the first two years after its opening, the architect kept spotting things he didn’t like.

“I drove them nuts. They almost banned me from coming,” he says with a laugh. “But now it’s OK.”

He would still like to see something more done with the restaurant area on Grand Avenue, and says he is interested in the plans to revitalize the downtown L.A. but he sounds fairly sanguine about his creation these days.

“The house I live in and Disney Hall are the only buildings I’ve designed that I use,” he says. “So I live with the compromises in my house and I live with it with whatever the so-called compromises are at Disney Hall, which aren’t that many.”